Why South African President Zuma's Reluctance To Dump Gadhafi?

It may seem like just proper politics – wait until one government is gone to endorse another. But, as usual, it’s more complicated then that.

For people who don’t know who South African President Jacob Zuma is, his only autobiography, from the 1980s, should be a place to start.

(7) Political or special education:

Had political ed. at the beginning of 1960’s. Began with Labour Theory and General politics with emphasis on our struggle, and late I was put in study group where we were taught M/L [Marxist/Leninist] theory. In 1978 I received military training in the Soviet Union.

The attached introduction to this reproduced document is from Paul Trewhela, a former South African Communist Party (SACP) member himself, explains it a little clearer: “At the time of writing he was a member of the Central Committee of the SACP, had received military training in the Soviet Union and – at the time of a subsequent note, dated 1989 – was Head of Intelligence in the ANC’s feared Department of Intelligence and Security, known as NAT. By this time he had been a member of the SACP and of Umkhonto weSizwe, the ANC’s military wing, for well over 20 years, ten years of which he had served in prison on Robben Island.” If there is still confusion, Joe Slovo’s daughter clears it up: “In 2004, I was with my sisters in Mozambique to commemorate those fighters of the ANC’s army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK for short), who had been killed in the Matola raid. Matola, a suburb of Maputo, was the base for a group of young, black South Africans, many under the command of our father, Joe Slovo, then MK’s chief of staff. He ran a special unit and the Matola men were his elite. … Zuma had worked in the Maputo underground.”

Joe Slovo did not come from South Africa or anywhere else on that continent. He was born in Lithuania and came to South Africa as a child with his parents, fleeing anti-Semitism in the Baltic. Supposedly inspired by Soviet gallantry in World War II, Joe became a Moscow loyalist during the Stalin era, when the regime was sinking into its own anti-Semitism, not to mention other mass atrocities. None of that bothered Slovo, who married the daughter of a South African Communist official and rose through the ranks to become General Secretary of the South African Communist Party.

The SACP, like the CPUSA, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. According to recently revealed files from Soviet intelligence, the USSR sustained the SACP through the KGB. As those files have it, Joe Slovo commanded Umkhonto we Sizwe, a special operations force which, in June 1980, launched four simultaneous attacks on oil storage tanks and a refinery at Secunda. Slovo didn’t carry out the attacks. He sent black Africans to do the heavy lifting and take the risks.

(If you want more info on Joe Slovo, check out Ron Radosh’s piece on him)

Anyway, what does this have to do with Gadhafi? Aren’t they on the complete opposite ends of the continent? Yep, and that was the point.

In 1973, Leonid Brezhnev told his then ally Somali leader Siad Barre: “Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends–the energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasure house of central and southern Africa.” (It should be noted that Brezhnev was talking to a North African leader, which would explain his limiting his Middle Eastern target to the Persian Gulf, but former top ranking Soviet bloc intelligence defector Ion Mihai Pacepa makes clear that their target was the Middle East as a whole.) Toward this end, according to investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein, based on an interview with legendary former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, “When Quadaffi came to power in 196[9], [old KGB hand Karl] Hanesch was transferred from the East German intelligence service to the Libyan Intelligence Service where he became their key security adviser. It was, according to communication intercepts, a part of the Soviet bloc arrangement to provide intelligence aid to Libya.”

Angleton is quoted as explaining that “It may be politically convenient to assume that Soviet bloc intelligence services act independently of the Soviet Union, especially when it concerns an assassination, but what we don’t really know, or perhaps want to know, is what is the nature of the relationship between the KGB and other Communist intelligence services.” Epstein continues: “He pointed out that the issue could not be peremptorily disposed of. Golitsyn and other defectors had described an extraordinary degree of coordination between these services, guaranteed by a systematic Soviet penetration of the top ranks of satellite services by the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. One role assigned the satellite services, according to these defectors, was to afford the Soviet Union cover, distance, and deniability in potentially embarrassing operations.”

So what we had was two seemingly different forces on the complete opposite sides of the continent being run by the same people – people on an entirely different continent.

These two conflicts became farther entwined as the plot almost succeeded. As Epstein explained in a separate article:

The only reason this plan failed was because the Reagan administration was able to undermine the Soviets’ control over oil prices. As uncovered by Big Peace’s very own Peter Schweizer, Reagan and the CIA were able to arrange a deal with the Saudis in which were to pump more oil and drive oil prices down in return for for our guarantying the Saudis safe passage through hostile waterways. Thus, the Soviets could do nothing but sit idly by and watch as the sole basis of their economy collapses with every passing ship.

The Cold War is over, but the bonds of friendship are not easily broken. Zuma and Gadhafi were on the same side, taking part in the same conspiracy. Like the old saying goes – the more things change, the more things stay the same.